Putting in the Time

June 13, 2008

Just got back to Appleton after four days at Denison University in Ohio. I was attending the al-Musharaka Summer Seminar sponsored by NITLE. The theme for this year was Crossing Borders. The goal was to put together a number of professors and librarians from liberal arts colleges to let them come up with ways to collaborate in teaching the Middle East and North Africa. My small group came up with the idea of using a wiki that we will call "Exploring Islamic Cities".. the idea being to create a space that can be used by our students to post their projects. As usual in these workshops some of the best time was spent just brainstorming about how to use and combine the resources available on the Internet.

I came away from the workshop more determined than ever to improve in my understanding of how to use various programs. I think it is a seriously wrong path to say: "I will get my IT folks to figure that out.." I don't think serious programming is in the cards for myself, but a deeper knowledge of tools like Flash and PHP would be wonderful.. and enable lots of my ideas. Eventually academics will have to stop thinking of themselves as elites who don't need to think about how programs work. Our goal should not be to produce the same old academic articles.. only now filed into an on-line database. Our goal should be to present our work in ways that are actively shaped by the medium of the Internet. That will mean—sooner or later—learning to mold our thinking along the lines of this new fantastically open medium for communication.

I really liked the comments of Rob MacDougall over at The Old is the New New. Concerning THATcamp (The Humanities and Technology) he writes:

If you’re a history or humanities graduate student looking to set yourself apart from the crowd, I strongly suggest thinking about getting involved in digital research. I’m afraid I don’t just mean a blog about robots. Demonstrate some programming chops along with your humanities education and there ought to be people who’ll want very much to hire you. Better yet, come up with some answers to the questions in my last paragraph. You don’t need a compsci degree, and you don’t need to be a math whiz. But you can’t be scared of your computer, and you do need to put in some time.

And that's a big deal: putting in the time. For me that means playing around with programs and experimenting. That, by the way, is one of the great uses of this blog: it functions as a giant sandbox of digital ideas. I get to put stuff together and try out ideas and see what happens. It is only over time that I get a sense of what works or doesn't work.

Here at the advent of my summer I am looking forward to getting started on some projects, which include:

1) starting up the Digital Cairo Project by the end of the summer.. including some translations of al-Maqrizi and basic time layers.
2) re-working this blog into a slightly cleaner version that incorporates more automatically updating features and a comment section for posts.
3) incorporating my sidebar topics into information that shows up on a GoogleMap
4) getting a new video camera and starting on some video projects (one long project and some shorter ones as well)
5) Learning how to use Flash well enough to incorporate it into some features on this site.
6) begin separate website for virtual travel forum.

But that will mean putting in the time..